It’s been a while since Chelsea Cain has had a new book on the stands. Since “Mockingbird” was cancelled, a lot has changed both in the world and in the life of the novelist-turned-comics-scribe. I had the pleasure of talking to her about a range of topics. We got to chat about everything from her new Image book “Man-Eaters,” the unique storytelling opportunities comics present, to the sometimes wonderful, sometimes terrible comic book community.
How did you make the transition from books to comics?
I was doing a storytelling event, and one of the other people at the event was Matt Fraction! Mark has the opportunity to meet many famous people, and he’s not the kind of person who is ever impressed by that at all, and for the first time ever, ever, he wanted to go. At the event he took me to the side and said, “I want you to introduce me to Matt Fraction.” (laughs) Mark was a big fan of his Thor, which was coming out at the time. I introduced them, and we all- Matt, Kelly Sue Deconnick, Mark, and I- just started talking at the end of the event. Then we hung out every day for the next eight weeks, and after that we were really good friends and… the thing about comics people, that I’ve observed as a person coming from outside of comics… I compare it feeding pigeons in the park. You feed a couple of pigeons and pretty soon more will arrive. I’ve found this true in comics- they all move together as a group, and (this is a broad generalization) they are not always the most socially comfortable people and so developing a friendship with one or two comic book people, they come with like, 75 other comic book people.
Suddenly Mark and I were at the center of this comic book community and Brian Michael Bendis has this Comic Book People feed that he does once a month. He puts food out, and the comic book people come and eat it! We started going to those events and got close with all those people.
I was a really big fan of “Alias,” it’s the comic that brought me back into Marvel. I read that as it came out in issues. That brought me back into superhero comics, which I read as a middle schooler but moved away from them into other comics. “Alias” I still think is one of the most brilliant narratives ever. I love “Hawkeye,” I love “Captain Marvel,” those were comics I was trying to deconstruct from a storytelling point of view. As a novelist I’m really interested in how people craft stories. So we started talking about that, and I started asking questions. Comic book people love nothing more than to talk about comics. (laughs) So that was fine by them! After a year of that I though I would like to try to do that. In the same way I might write a poem or a song and then not share that with anyone. To see if I could try the shape of that to apply that to my actual job.
I bought Bendis’s book “Words For Pictures,” and I read it and I started trying to figure it out. In the process I decided that I in particular wanted to look at the Marvel universe and see what some of the women were thinking.
One of the things about comics is that they treat point of view very different than they do in novels. Where the standard Marvel point of view is the big editorial voice that’s often just Stan Lee, or Chris Claremont, an editorial voice directing you: “Meanwhile in New York” or “The Worst day in Avengers history.” It gives you the sense that the story is cannon, what we see is true. We might go inside people’s heads maybe with a thought balloon or now with captions, but we’re not seeing it through their point of view. Character point of view is rooted through seeing what that character knows and nothing more. That’s not what goes on in most comics.
Continued belowI really thought it would be interesting to go back to a female Marvel hero, someone from my youth in particular, and see something from her point of view and see how it differs from what’s been presented as cannon.
It was my husband who came up with idea to try Mockingbird. She’s someone who’s been around for so long and when she’s written well she’s really interesting but she’s always defined by her relationship to Hawkeye. All of this stuff has happened to her to move Clint’s story forward, she’s been a plot device and thought it would be so cool to look at her from her perspective. And also she was a little bit of a blank slate, more than a Sue Storm or whatever.
You found the biologist angle which got used in one of my favorite recent series, “Unbeatable Wasp.” And that grabbed your version and now she’s a mentor character.
CC: I love that!
I love that too! That’s one of the things I love about comics, when you can see which writers are fans of which other writers and then you see the story from a meta-level of who likes who and how they are going to bring their stuff into their own writing.
CC: Yeah, and I write series books. It’s a lot of world building. To come into comics where all that work has been done, it’s really liberating. I can show an HMO room in a SHIELD facility and people know why that’s funny. I can show Tony Stark reading a gonorrhea brochure and people know why that’s funny. It’s no work at all, just a punch line! It’s new for me, it’s really fun. It’s all just there for the taking.
So you found that more freeing than constricting?
CC: Definitely, especially when I thought of approaching everything from point of view. By its nature its unreliable. Any time we look at a story from someone’s point of view they have a stake in it. Our entire life being brought into it. The way we process information. I felt like that was freeing. I wanted to deconstruct the entire notion of cannon which I find kind of problematic, because we accept that everything that “happened” is “true.” That means that all of this sexist bullshit. If we accept everything in comics as cannon than the point of view of those ten white 30 year old men becomes the only point of view. They could be brilliant storytellers- and they are!!- but I really wanted to deconstruct that the best I could. To make it obvious that what we were seeing was Bobbi’s story. It was no more or less reliable than anyone else’s story. I hope that I pulled at the yarn of that sweater, the sweater of continuity.
Yeah, but also with a bunch of drugs and madness and corgis.
CC: Right yeah! Corgis, Madness, Drugs. (laughs)
That’s the title of the next trade.
CC: Right! And like with Bobbi, her whole weird backstory with the Phantom Rider and the rapey Western stuff, those are great comics! I love that arc. It’s so terrible but it’s incredible well written and really visual and weird and… yeah, really well done! I just think adding perspective doesn’t have to take away from anything that’s been done before.
I feel that way about a lot of old Captain Marvel, Carol Danvers stories. They’re messed up, but a lot of them are really well done and were favorites of mine when I was too young to know any better.
CC: I think Captain Marvel is a success story in ALL the ways. In terms of Marvel making an effort for a period of years to reach new audiences and tell new stories. And that went fantastically well. Could it have been with a different character? Probably. There are so many female characters in the Marvel universe, I’m so interested in learning about them. More interested than I am about learning about a female version of a male hero.
I feel you, although maybe I’m a hyppocrite because I’m wearing my Fraction Kate Bishop Hawkeye T-Shirt.
CC: (laughs) I noticed that! But like c’mon, Hawkeye is the best. I spent many, many, MANY hours taking those apart trying to reverse engineer his comics just to figure out how the fuck he did it. He’s reeeeally talented.
Continued belowThat’s so cool that you got into comics through that awesome Portland comics scene. What does that group look like as an outsider coming in?
CC: It’s ironic for Chelsea Cain. Many people would know me in the comics world more about the Twitter response to “Mockingbird” which is more a story of exclusion. In fact my experience has been just the opposite where the community of comics creators has been incredibly generous, incredibly kind, incredibly inclusive.
I’m looking at the time and I could talk about how you feel about Marvel characters and “Mockingbird” specifically, but we gotta talk about “Man-Eaters” or the Image people will be really mad at me!
CC: I got mine right here!
Oh my god it’s glittering!
Really!? I was wondering!
CC: I didn’t. It’s a coincidence. Probably more the other way around.
So my first question about “Man-Eaters” is… please tell me about your cats.
CC: I have one cat and two dogs, a Corgi and a Boston Terrier. My cat is Phoenix who is a tortoiseshell manx. She runs the house.
I figured from the premise of “Man-Eaters” you’d have to be a cat person, but I figured from “Mockingbird…” Corgis! How do we reconcile this?
CC: It’s tricky. When I grew up on a hippie commune we had ten cats and ten dogs. I’ve always had a lot of pets, but I consider myself more of a cat person than a dog person.
I am very interested in the way cats culturally, the way we imagine cats often mirrors the way we imagine women. I think cats in general are considered more feminine than dogs if we had to ascribe a gender to them. Cats we put them in the same broad categories that we want to put women in. I’m also a big fan on the 1982 Cat People with Natasha Kinski and that’s probably informed “Man-Eaters” more than anything else. It’s a really good movie, it’s so screwed up!
I have a fascination with the slew of non-comics people that are entering the comics scene and what they are bringing from their previous job into it. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Saladin Ahmed, Rainbow Rowell. They’re not comics people, but all of their sensibilities are like a whole different kind of creator. In the first issue of “Man-Eaters” there are all sorts of charts and graphs that feel very fresh and original- where did that come from?
CC: That was all me! Those exist also in “Mockingbird,” it comes down to point of you. They’re mental asides. In a strong third person point of view, you’re just going to see action storyboarded. But because we’re embedded in this character’s point of view, she is telling us this story. Ever though we’re seeing action she was not present for, she is still communicating that action. We only see what she thinks she knows happened or what she wants to tell us happened. So the mental asides whether they are a chart or a single panel flashback, or a one-beat joke, it’s a way to bring us closer to her, to remind us that we are in her hands. She’s in control of the story and making points that she wants to make.
It all comes back to perspective?
CC: Yeah. And No. That’s where that starts from, but that’s… also… I am a novelist and one of the things that attracts me to comics is looking at what I can do narratively what I can’t do in prose-
That’s what I was trying to get at actually.
CC: And I love that! That can do so much work. That simple visual aside can do more work than 10 pages of words.
Yeah. You don’t see a lot of people who have started in comics and have been in comics for fifteen years, they don’t think to put in graphical asides and pie charts. They’re much more likely to stick with the action storyboard.
CC: I definitely breaks the rules. The weird thing about comics is that there are rules… they tell you how things should be because those six 30 year old guys sat down and figured it out, and their rules work, but I’m not interested in that.
Continued belowThere’s another rule you guys break. Every time there’s an image within the image, like a graphic-tee, or a TV screen, or a cell phone, it’s a completely different art style. Much more photo-realistic. Was that coming from you? What was the goal with that?
CC: Yeah, it was coming from me and I really wanted to ground the mythology in the real world. There’s that sense that this is a cartoonish comic book, a story that fits expectations and yet it also is steeped in metaphors about what it’s like to be an adolescent girl in this exact moment in time in our culture. I wanted to create a discomfort- some discord! Some TENSION! Between those two ideas. To make sure it was still grounded in reality.
So all those images are tying the reader to our reality even though they look like they are from a completely different reality within the confines of the book.
CC: Exactly. There’s a Time Magazine cover: “Are Girls Turning Into Killer Cats?” The image on that cover is a piece of stock photography. The rules of the form are to have Kate draw her version of a teenage girl but for it to be a Time Magazine cover reminds us that no, this shit is actually happening. These themes are real world topics that we should all be talking about. And I love the way that it looks! It creates a depth effect that is interesting. My husband is a collector, I’m an enthusiast. I’ll read a comic in like, four minutes. And it kills him. It physically kills him. Parts of him die when he sees me blow through a comic book so quickly. He’ll spend 10 minutes on every page. I’m a big fan of re-readability.
A big fan of re-readability. It’s something I tried to do with “Mockingbird,” and I’ve committed to it with “Man-Eaters.”
There’s another place where you guys use it where there’s bloodstains in the background but the blood within the panels is Kate’s drawings.
CC: Actual crime scene blood!
Actual crime scene blood!?
CC: Literally!
I love it! That’s amazing!
CC: It is! Because it adds a layer of reality. It makes it more horrifying. Even on like a subconscious level because the two mediums of art. On an experiential level it builds that tension but then… it’s actual blood! It looks like real blood! When I only have a page to convey a horrifying crime that has to motivate emotional momentum, that’s good tool to make it scarier.
Chelsea Cain breaks all the rules! Are there other comics that you think are playing with the form?
CC: It’s less common in superhero comics because those have such a quite timeframe. But Matt Fraction is a master of that! It’s a thing I learned from “Hawkeye.” He does some interesting things with point of view, with “Hawkeye” utilizing alt-comics techniques with superhero narratives. It’s incredibly effective! It’s not showy, it doesn’t draw attention to itself. It’s just really really good! One thing that is so good is that I notice so much more on the re-read.
Next I want to ask about ‘your feminist agenda.’ From the time you got the “Mockingbird” gig until now, how has it changed? You’ve probably had some personal experiences that have changed your view, definitely globally things have changed.
CC: I was really shocked that people were shocked by “Mockingbird.” It was really eye-opening. Just giving a female comic book hero a voice… was controversial? I didn’t know we were back there dealing with that bullshit. It woke me pretty fast about the state of feminism in American culture in actuality versus where I thought we were. All of the blowback I got (and the more I got and the more ridiculous it got!) the more committed I became to doing more. We obviously aren’t done here. We obviously need more comics and more characters that will piss people off in the same way that “Mockingbird.” The very fact they were pissed off is the problem. I wanted to tell the kind of story that could address that and also the kind of story that I wish I could have read as a 13 year old comic book reader. And it took me a while to figure out what that was gonna be.
And I wanted to do it with the entire “Mockingbird” creative team! Frankly I felt really bad that they had all been fired. That really sucked. I felt responsible for them. They’re all freelancers and they’re all really excellent and we were just getting our footing. I really wanted to get the band back together. We had unfinished business. These guys trust me for better or worse.
